 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Well welcome back, we're live here in Las Vegas at re-invent, AWS putting on its annual show, and you might notice the volume's gone up a little bit around here, well it's the five o'clock reception time here, so the show floor has a little different vibe to it, you might say, right now. Justin Moran, John Walsh, you kind of feel it, don't you right now? Oh yeah, there is an energy, just sort of vibrating around us. I can feel the energy lifting as the boost starts to flow some more. The energy's a good way to put it. Right, we're with W. Curtis Preston, who is the Chief Technical Architect at Druva, and Curtis, thanks for being with us. Glad to be here. Do you feel the vibe too? I feel the vibe, I feel the vibe standing out in the big line to get in here. Yeah, not on, yeah in here. Now we're in here, it's a lot of people. Good, by the way, for those who are not at home, not familiar, you were named this year on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list, 175. Quite an honor. I assume you're talking about Druva, not me personally. Yeah, Druva, not you, although maybe you did, I don't know. Yeah, I don't think, yeah. But that's quite an accomplishment though, and quite an honor for the company. I mean, tell a little bit about that, about that process, and what do you think that means? What's that stamp of approval for what you guys are doing? Well, I think it's just, like a lot of those lists, it's a recognition of the position that we're holding, right? I mean, Druva historically is really well known for their protection of endpoints and SaaS applications. They're expanding into data center and cloud protection, but I think they're absolutely recognized as the leader in the protection of endpoints. So characterize the cloud work you guys are doing. Like you said, this is a new move for you, I mean, relatively new move, but the market's driving that way, right? People are starting to nod their head, they're thinking, yep, this is where we need to be. So what has been your strategy then as far as facilitating what's not no longer a trend, it's a way of life? Yeah, so I'd say first off, we are definitely, unlike a lot of other players, we are a cloud-first company in that it's not a strategy, it's a way of life. So our entire application is built in and for the cloud, and by that I mean that it takes advantage of everything that the cloud offers, right? And when you look at specifically AWS, a lot of backup software products use, they all use some kind of database, some kind of catalog to keep track of all the backups. And all of those catalogs, all of those databases, whether it's SQL Server or DB2 or Oracle, they all have scalability limits. We chose to use DynamoDB, which is an incredibly scalable NoSQL database that's built and available in Amazon as a service. And then all of our products all run in Amazon, right? And so we can scale both up and down to meet the requirements of a customer. So if we get a new customer, we had a customer that I can't mention by name, but they're a large company that started out with what we consider a small installation of about 10,000 laptops. And that was nice. And then it went well, and then there was a ransomware scare. And so they said, you know what? We're going to go ahead and do everything. And so suddenly we needed to do 10 times as many laptops. Well, because of the way AWS is, we could scale both the database, the compute and the storage all instantly to meet the demands of that client. And then once that's done, scale it back down to get back to a state of normal, right? So for us, the cloud is sort of the core of who we are. And then the only expansion for us is actually protecting the cloud. So we've always used the cloud as our destination, but now our newest offering Apollo actually is designed to protect starting with AWS and then expanding into the rest of the Amazon, what I should say, starting with EC2 and then eventually expanding into the rest of the AWS world. All right, so with the tradition of endpoint protection and clearly that, it's really loud, I'll make sure I'm yelling. So with the heritage that you've got of backing up endpoints and being able to protect endpoints and now you're moving to protect cloud workloads. As you say, you've got this cloud heritage, but you're now looking at protecting workloads that live in the cloud. What are some of the things that Dhruva's bringing from that endpoint knowledge that applies to those cloud type workloads? Well, I think the idea is that, one of the things about the cloud, when people sort of view, I think there's steps of people using AWS, right? They sort of experiment and they try out this and that. But once somebody really understands like we did, the things you can do when you have, when you can scale your VMs instantly and limitlessly, and your storage, and your compute, and your databases, once they go down that route, I think the fact that we, not necessarily the history of the endpoint itself, but the infrastructure that we built in order to protect those endpoints is already totally scalable and ready to meet the needs of however big of a workload that you'll put in AWS. Yeah, I often like to say that cloud is a state of mind. So if you've already got that state of mind that I want to run my workloads in a cloud-like way, well, I want to be able to protect them in a cloud-like way. And it sounds like that that's really what you're trying to nail. Yeah, and it's a big difference because any, like, I can look out and see multiple backup products available. And, you know, there's a lot of good backup products here, but any of them can run in the cloud, right? You can create a Linux VM or a Windows VM and install your backup software, but it's not going to magically become more scalable because you're running it at Amazon, right? So designing the product for Amazon and that scalable way of doing things, that's why we talk about being cloud-native. So how are you attracting customers who would have traditionally thought of you as this endpoint customer, sorry, an endpoint company? As well, now you're actually saying, look, we have these at different offerings. So how are you starting to talk to those different kind of customers? How are you finding them and what is it that you're finding resonates with them as compared to some of the other options that they might have? Yeah, so as you probably know, I've been in the backup space now for a quarter of a century. Literally wrote the book. Literally wrote the book, right? It's on O'Reilly. O'Reilly.com. We'll give you a plug later. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, all right. The, so, yeah, literally wrote the book. Yeah. One thing I can say, there's a couple of things I can say about backups in general in the average data center. One is everybody hates their backup software, right? It's just like nobody likes it because it's so hard, right? It's so hard to configure and you get, using disk as a mechanism instead of tape as a primary mechanism has made things better but it hasn't really solved it, right? It's still this really difficult to manage. There's this massive amount of infrastructure that has to be put in place to do all of that. And because that's so hard and it's so error prone and it's, you know, you're invisible or you're in trouble. No one cares about the millions of backups you get right. Only the one restore you got wrong. And so what that translates into is the other truth which is nobody wants to be the backup guy, right? I mean, the way I got my first job in backups 24 years ago was a guy named Ron Rodriguez did not want to be the backup guy. And Curtis, you're it. Yeah, you're it. And I within two months had my first major failure as the backup guy for a $35 billion company and I thought I was done. I thought I was fired like so many other backup people and somehow just accidentally I ended up staying. And so what happens is it's so hard. So the question is, so to go to your question, well, what if it was simple, right? And the situation is it's not, the current system's not scalable. You're always buying another media server. You're always buying another tape drive. You're always buying another dedu-box. You know, you're always out of something, right? I remember having to go to my boss and being out of tapes. This is, you know, back when tapes were a thing. And I remember saying, hey, I'm out of tapes. And she's like, we don't have budget. I go, she's like, what are our choices? And I go, well, I can stop the backups. She's like, that's not funny. I'm like, that's our choice, right? I have so much capacity here, right? These are my choices, right? So she gave me the tapes that I needed, right? And the same thing, so it's not scalable, the current system. You're always in need of some piece. It's also super expensive, right? And it's super hard. So we try to be the opposite of that. So we try to be scalable, simple, and, you know, save people money, right? And that was one, I know we have a 4S thing. And it's right there on the tip of your tongue, right, right? And, but basically we try to be the opposite of everything the backups are. So the big thing is, it's way easier. Just put a piece of software and magic happens, right? And if you're large enough data center that you need to do what we call seeding, where you have to use sneaker net to get the data to us, we have a system for that. If you have a large enough system where the RTO is not going to be able to be met by a copy that's on the other side of the internet, then we have a caching appliance that goes on site to provide fast recovery. So it's like it's super simple, way less expensive, and I do mean way less expensive. When I've seen some TCOs where we compete against other companies, we're even less expensive than renewing what you have, let alone going and buying. Replacing, yeah. And replacing it with something else, because that happens all the time. People are always, because people are always swapping their backup software, because the problem has got to be the backup software, right? And I think in the end, it is, right? But it's because that core architecture, that core way of we've done backups, has essentially stayed the same since before I started. All we did was we changed tape to disk, right? And we introduced DDoop, which was great, but there's this technology that we call DDoop that is really hard when you do it on the back end. There's a company here who makes a lot of money on selling those appliances, right? Except it's really hard to do that, and so it's really expensive to do that, and then you got to pay for one here, and you got to pay for one over there. With us, you don't buy that, you just go straight to us, and then because we're in AWS, it's already in three locations, right? And it's already off-site. Well, Curtis, they said 24 years ago it wasn't going to last, but it did. You made it, congratulations. Thanks. Yeah, we appreciate the time here. Thanks for being with us here on theCUBE, and on 175th next year, who knows where you're going, right? Who knows where we're going. Excellent. Curtis Preston, join us here from Druva. Back with more live from Las Vegas, we are at ReInvent at AWS, back with more in a bit.